Branching Out

Friday

Aug 1, 2008 at 2:00 AM

By Gabriella Burnham I&M Staff Writer

At first it looked more like a cross between a rabbit and a whale. But eventually – after years of trimming and (quite literally) watching the plants grow – Rob Ranney’s large topiary outside Denby Real Estate filled into the impressive green whale sculpture it is today.

“There would be times when I was out there trimming it and people would say, ‘What is that? What are you doing? It looks like a rabbit’,” said Ranney, an appraiser with his family-owned real estate company that last year leased the North Water Street property on which the topiary sits to Atlantic East Real Estate.

But the topiary isn’t going anywhere. Ranney has been maintaining it for about 25 years now, yet had little experience in landscape when he first started, other than cutting his grandmother’s hedges.

“Patience. It takes a lot of patience,” he said this week.

As part of its annual Art Design Challenge, the Nantucket Island School of Design & the Arts is encouraging other Nantucket residents to test their patience and try their own hand at topiary art. The challenge will commence this summer and continue on until next summer, when the completed topiaries will be showcased in a final exhibition.

Since NISDA’s annual sand castle and sculpture contest has been such a success, executive director and founder Kathy Kelm saw this challenge as another opportunity to elicit artistic vision in artists and non-artists alike.

“Sand is in abundance here on Nantucket. We see it when we go to the beach, when we’re building sand castles and collecting shells. (The sandcastle contest) really shows the innate creativity in everyone. Honestly, they’re really beautiful. It’s outstanding what people do. People love to get together. They love to create and work in a team. So I thought, ‘What else is here on Nantucket that’s in abundance’?” Kelm said.

Her answer was plant life: Yew, boxwood, privet. All of these shrubs are both common on Nantucket and perfect for topiary-growing because of their dense foliage and finer leaves. They also do not require much sunlight and can withstand colder weather conditions.

“Just like sand, we have this wonderful greenery on Nantucket. This year the challenge will be to get the idea (for your topiary sculpture). This is the thumbnail-sketch phase,” said Kelm. The topiary teams should consist of a homeowner, a landscaper/gardener, and an artist who will work together to use the island’s natural plant life to create a piece of artwork. The only guideline is, the creation cannot be visible from the road, said Kelm.

Last Wednesday night, Lalla Searle, the senior lecturer for landscape architecture at the Rhode Island School of Design, came and spoke at NISDA about topiary designs from all over the world, ranging from the smaller topiary form, to the intricate chessboard, to the garden maze.

In terms of topiary art, one year is actually not a lot of time to realize a completed form, so Searle’s main advice is to plan ahead.

“If they did it in privet, it’s fast-growing. Yew would take longer, unless they did a small topiary. You could clip out a shape with an existing plant, otherwise it would take three or more years to achieve a complicated shape,” said Searle.

Another possibility would be to create an armature – essentially a skeletal support – out of wire, stuff it with moss, and cover the form in vine. The only drawback with this method is that vine leaves are typically very course, therefore complicated turns and corners would lose their shape.

Searle also offered some advice on the process of creating art from live material.

“A hand clipper or a pruning sheer, not the hand sheer, that’s good for a planer surface. But to do intricate shapes, I would recommend a one-hand clipper. Electric clippers go fast, but you could accidentally trim something off and revert back to the beginning,” she added.

Espalier is another plant-form manipulation technique that takes a tree – usually a fruit tree like the fig, apple or pear – and trains the branches to grow against a wall. The gardener must cut back any branches that grow forward, backward, or those that interfere with the desired shape so that the only branches left grow flat and outward, creating a fan pattern.

This constant altering of a plant’s natural shape originated in ancient Rome and Greece, where intricate garden designs symbolized wealth and man’s control over Mother Nature. “For the Romans it was a show of conspicuous consumption. The slaves came mostly from Greece and they were called topiariai. They were in charge of pruning shrubs into different shapes: ships, horses, all kinds of letters. It was a very common form of gardening back then,” said Searle.

Today, topiary gardens are not just reserved for the wealthy and landscape-savvy. As Ranney and any islander with a hedge proves, even a beginner-level gardener can grow a successful topiary form.

“These are especially long-lived projects,” said Ranney. “If a part grows that you’re not happy with, you sort of snip it off and hope it grows back how you want it. It just takes a lot of patience, really.”

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